This is the best argument I’ve come across for why git is special and worth your time. I’ve seen glimpses of this before, but I’ve never seen the argument put so well. An excerpt: Git is a new kind of filesystem, and it’s faster than any filesystem I’ve ever seen: git checkout is faster than cp -a. It…

You keep using this word; I don’t think it means what you think it means. — The Princess Bride So everyone knows that UTF-8 encodes Unicode code points into eight bits, and UTF-16 encodes Unicode code points into 16 bits (or, two bytes), right? I mean…”UTF-8″ has the answer right there in the name, doesn’t it? Nope. unicode.org…

Scenario You have an Asterisk server behind a Check Point firewall trying to contact a VOIP provider located on the Internet Problem SIP requires that your VOIP provider be able to contact you through your firewall on the port that you registered from When your Asterisk box registers it registers with both source and destination port of UDP…

The über-tech-geek culture has a problem with tool obsession. Twitter, Friendfeed, Google Reader–these are all basics, but each of these have multiple competitors that the most afflicted like to sample, discuss, and obsess over ad nauseam. What ends up happening is we forget what those tools are actually for, i.e. the problems they’re supposedly trying to solve. Even…

A friend of mine (I’ll identify him if he so desires) sent me the following email: Just a quick thought. With Amazon hyping up the new Kindle so much, and with so many quality e-book readers available, why are Kindle edition books more expensive than the dead tree versions? There is no production cost beyond digitizing the media…

I’ll mess this up, but here are the various ways we’ve been able to enjoy music throughout history: Live Vinyl Radio 8-Track Cassette CD MP3 …? Cloud. Spotify is the future of music. Not the company, necessarily, but the model it uses. See if this appeals to you: All Music Ever Made (and you can upload to it)…

I’m often asked why I think so much of Quicksilver, and why it’s always part of my pitch when I’m trying to get someone to move to OS X. The reasons are legion, but if I had to pick one it’d be how I use Quicksliver to perform web searches. I show how I use them here in…

Twitter Search continues to impress me. It’s quickly becoming one of the best things about the service. I woke up this morning and noticed that my Feedburner/Google subscriber count had plummeted from around 900 to around 400–a drop of 500. Content creators don’t like that because it makes you start wondering what you did wrong. Was it that…

So I now have fully functioning VOIP at the house using Asterisk, but I currently only have a soft phone, i.e. phone software running on my Mac vs. a real phone. I’ve been taking my time with picking the actual hardware phones I’m going to get as I want to be sure I make the right decision. And…

We all have a problem keeping up with friends and family that have moved away. The problem is simple: we, as humans, can only have so many relationships as priorities in our lives, and we naturally move the people we can see and interact with to the top of our lists. To put it more strongly, people who…

I’ve come to a simple conclusion regarding George W. Bush’s legacy. Here’s how it’ll happen: Within a few years we will leave Iraq in the way that matters most, i.e. we will no longer have enough of a physical, visible presence to apply the counter-force to the country’s natural state of chaos. The new Iraqi government will fragment…

I’m trying to come up with a simple decision tree, or flowchart, for when something should be tweeted vs. when it should get the respect of a full blog entry. Here’s what I’ve come up with. Move through the blogging rules below and see if you get a match. If you don’t, move on to the Twitter rules.…

I’ve changed the color and increased the font size on my Twitter posts on the right. I’ve done this for a clear reason: to highlight the fact that Twitter being in my sidebar is part of my actual blogging platform, as opposed to supplemental or peripheral content. In other words, in terms of my own Twitter content, Twitter…

There are few things that help one’s efficiency more than being good with his preferred shell. Many know of the ! option within bash that allows one to retrieve and run commands from history automatically. You simply start with a ! and add the first few letters of a command you’ve recently run, and Bash will run that…

[ For OS X Users… ] First, enable US, US Extended, and Unicode Hex Input through the Input Menu tab of the International pane within System Preferences: Now you can just hold down the ⌥ key from within any text-entry field and type the 4-character unicode designations for the following characters: ⇧ – 21E7 ⌥ – 2325 ⌘…

Like many others, I’m trying to figure out where Twitter fits. Not just in my life online, but in general. I recently tweeted a question: Should non-DM tweets include context? In other words, should Twitter remain a micro-blogging platform vs. chat, or is it too late? This captures part of the problem. It’s not a micro-blogging platform if…

I’m seriously impressed with Google’s newbile browser offering, Chrome. I like the simplicity of its interface, its speed, and most of all how it handles searches. But Chrome still lacks a ton of features (plugins, most importantly), and many believe it’s little more than a half-baked experiment with little chance for success. I disagree, and here’s why: Google…

This post shows someone expressing disappointment with some future predictions given by Kurzweil back in 1999. Here they are as documented by the poster: Individuals primarily use portable computers Portable computers have dramatically become lighter and thinner Personal computers are available in a wide range of sizes and shapes, and are commonly embedded in clothing and jewelry, like…

Anyone who likes Reddit needs to check out another similar site called Hacker News. It’s rather like Reddit used to be before it went mainstream, i.e. lacking the high noise that reddit now has. The big difference is that this one is almost purely technical in nature. Definitely check it out if you’re looking for a high-quality reddit…

One of the reasons people don’t want to leave Firefox for Google’s new Chrome Browser is Firefox’s Quicksearch feature, which allows you to use single character prefixes to search various sites from Firefox’s URL bar. Fortunately, you don’t have to leave this functionality behind if you decide to move to Chrome. In fact, Google actually implements Quicksearches in…

When you create a screenshot (or “screen capture”) in OS X it’s dropped onto the desktop as a PNG file with name of “Picture 1.png”. And the next one you create drops “Picture 2.png”, etc. This is cool, but it gets annoying over time–especially if you make a lot of them. The problem is that you can’t just…

It can be frustrating to not have a system for your iPhone app organization–especially if you’re an optimization freak like me. Here’s how I do it: I use four screens, organized in the following way: 1. Primary Applications These are the core applications that you use the most. I tend to keep the most important ones in the…

It’s kind of annoying that ls –color doesn’t work in OS X. Fortunately you can get the same effect by adding the following to your .bash_profile : export CLICOLOR=true Edit: Evidently you can do this with the -G switch to ls as well. Thanks for the tip, Joel.

Everyone knows the future of technology lies with the individual. One of the ways this will come about is through something I’ve been thinking about for years now. I call it the Personal Daemon, or Personal Server (I’ve not put the effort into a better name). My buddy Ken and I have been talking for years about how…

The ultimate way to demonstrate (in a semi-rude fashion) that when people ask you questions they’re just outsourcing work to you, and that they should do it themselves. Example: How many feet in a mile? Answer: [ How Many Feet in a Mile | letmegooglethatforyou.com ]

I’ve been struggling with a problem for a while now. The problem is how to properly display on my site everything online that I create vs. everything online that I find and enjoy. The issue is that these two types of content need to be differentiated to provide maximum value to readers. So here are my requirements. I…

Yeah, that Notepad. It has a feature that few know about, and I’m not talking about word wrap. You can actually use it as a log file. By typing “.LOG” on the first line of a Notepad file and then saving the file, you automatically add a current date and time stamp every time you re-open the file.…

You don’t have to be an ego-freak to wonder if others are talking about you online. Egosurfing, i.e. the act of looking yourself up in search engines, is something most regular Internet users have done at least once. It’s very human to want to know if we’re affecting the world we live in. So the old way to…

Ever wanted to take a piece of WordPress functionality and put it in a non-WordPress portion of your website? Like, for example, pulling your WordPress Sidebar and dropping it into a custom page of yours? Well, here’s how to make it work. The Wrong Way Many have tried doing this simple include below and have met with failure.…

I made a prediction a couple months before the original iPhone came out that features would not be the deciding factor in whether or not the device was successful. I also refined that argument here. I think time has shown me to be right on this one. Here’s what I wrote in May of 2007: My point, which…

Like many others I procured an iPhone 3G this weekend. I won’t go into overall comments here as I’m just addressing a single issue. I’ve been having trouble with dropping down to EDGE fairly often while right in the middle of a 3G-enabled area. If you’re having this problem here’s a possible work-around, which seems to have helped…

First of all, I mactard-zealot-camped at a local AT&T store (most spent in my car, though, not in my chair) from 8pm to 8am, and was first in line. Both I and my fiance were able to get the 3G phones (her 8GB, me 16GB), and we both got the black case. We spent about 40 minutes buying…

I’ve been wondering what kind of speeds I should expect on my new iPhone 3G when I get it Friday. So I did some research and here’s what I came up with. Short Answer: Fast HSPA (AT&T’s 3G) currently has a theoretical maximum of around out at 14 Megabit/sec, but it looks like the “observed maximum” for the…

FriendFeed is a relatively new service designed to let you stay in contact with your friends in a more complete way than other services. Twitter is an excellent service because it allows one to microblog and push updates via sms, but this doesn’t show your friends everything you’re doing. Someone wanting to follow your blog posts, your picassa/flikr…

I’ve been gathering requirements for my Asterisk-based home VOIP system and have just had an epiphany. I don’t need to buy any wireless VOIP phones to use with my Asterisk box; soon I’ll be able to just use my iPhone as my home phone! I was looking at the Aastra and Linksys options, for example, and preparing to…

This isn’t one of those “Google is the NSA” posts. Well, it kind of is. The way the Government ends up with all our shit is not through some massive raid where we hand over all our passwords against our will. The numbers don’t add up. There’d be too many unhappy people — as in “Malotov” unhappy. No,…

Ever wonder what mail servers people run? I found myself wondering what the top universities used, so I wrote a lame little script to go and query the top 50 schools from this list, find out their mail servers, and then netcat to them to see what they respond with. The results were interesting. I was specifically wondering…

Apple complicated things yesterday when they released MobileMe. I’m a huge fan of Google services and use Google Apps to host my domain’s email. Plus I use Google Reader, Google Calendar, and a number of other applications of theirs. Until Apple’s announcement I was looking for more integration between iCal and Google Calendar with the new 2.0 software.…

A fellow security blogger, Michael Farnum, has posted a piece that I felt compelled to respond to. In the post he essentially complains that most of the pro-pc/anti-mac commentary he reads at Computerworld get modded down, while the pro-mac/anti-pc stuff he sees usually gets modded up. He goes on to write: So if you own a Mac and…

In the future, after we’ve started integrating computers into our brains to enhance them, we’ll develop a concept of aug and naug (augmented, non-augmented), pronounced and likely spelled: og and nog. The terms will apply to the measure of human mental achievement, specifically to indicate whether a particular mental feat or accomplishment was attained with or without assistance…

[ Published: May 12, 2002 ] Our society is about to change drastically, and not in 20 or 50 years, and not because of cybernetics or nanotechnology. It’s about to change due to lifecasting. Lifecasting in its current form is where people broadcast, usually via a mounted camera at home, a significant portion of their lives. Justin.tv is…

At RSA this year I caught a talk by a Google executive that discussed what makes Google’s Information Security team so unique. I found the talk quite informative and thought it was worth sharing. It would be great if more companies had this perspective. Everyone on the Security Team is a Programmer Read that again. Every single person…

If you’re an efficiency/productivity nut like I am you are probably also obsessed with keyboard shortcuts. One of the main ones for me is the ability to close documents in OS X without saving them. So, given the dialog above, how do you select “Don’t Save” without using your mouse? You can’t use the arrow keys, and you…

Safari is an excellent browser for many reasons; its speed, clean aesthetics and ease of use are attractive from the outset. In addition to these obvious strengths there are a few extremely attractive features of Safari that most are unaware of. Browsing and Search Snapback URL Path Navigation Web Inspector Activity Window Inline Dictionary Selection to Speech Quick…

[Edit: An updated version of this post, with 6 additional features, can be found here] Safari is an excellent browser for many reasons; its speed, clean aesthetics and ease of use are attractive from the outset. But there are a few extremely attractive and lesser known features that people should be taking advantage of as well. Browsing and…

Net Neutrality is one of the most important challenges facing civilization as a whole right now, yet most people don’t even know – let alone care – about it. Here’s my simple summary of the issue, and please be sure to watch (and pass along) the video that comes after it. Radio and newspaper, when they were first…